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by tamas 6122 days ago
Blue eyes and blonde/red hair are recessive traits, while brown eyes and hair are dominant. You having blue eyes means both of the gene pairs that control eye color have the recessive blue, while your wifes brown eyes can be caused by having a set of blue and a set of brown genes, and as brown is the dominant one, it is what was actually expressed in here eye color. The fact that your children have blue eyes means she does have genes for blue eyes, and they are inherited into your children as well as your blue genes, hence their blue eyes. The same goes for blonde/red vs brown hair.

Either that, or consult with your milkman/gardener.

1 comments

You having blue eyes means both of the gene pairs that control eye color have the recessive blue, while your wifes brown eyes can be caused by having a set of blue and a set of brown genes, and as brown is the dominant one, it is what was actually expressed in here eye color.

My wife is from a part of China that is not very likely to have any genes for blue eyes (or red hair) in the indigenous population. The overwhelming probability is that she is homozygotic for both black hair and brown eyes.

The fact that your children have blue eyes means she does have genes for blue eyes

There is a reading problem here, because I never said anywhere in my post that any of my children have blue eyes. (In fact, these days I am startled whenever I see a child with blue eyes, even though I grew up with siblings with blue eyes, because all my children and my wife look at me with brown eyes. I see blue eyes and ask myself, "Do they make eyes in that color too?")

You also are well advised to do more reading about the genetics of human eye color and hair color

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_color

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_hair_color

and human genetics in general. Genes can recombine from one generation to the next. My red-haired dad, by the usual assumption that you made in your reply, was homozygotic for red hair, making me presumptively heterozygotic for red hair, while my wife presumptively is not a carrier of that trait at all, on population genetics probabilities. But two of my children have hair that is "brown" at a glance but also includes red pigment (as can be seen when their hair is backlit by sunlight or when strands of their hair are observed under a microscope). Sometimes children can inherit a double copy on one gene from just one parent, as anyone who has carefully studied human genetics knows.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/omim/